From the Editors

Listen to an interview with EI cofounder Ali Abunimah on Flashpoints, 94.1FM, Berkeley, California. Senior producer Nora Barrows-Friedman interviewed Mohammed Omar in Rafah about Israel’s killing of seven Palestinian children in Gaza, and Dennis Bernstein interviewed EI’s Ali Abunimah about National Public Radio’s lack of reportage of the incident. The show was originally broadcast on Flashpoints on 4 January 2005.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died overnight in a Paris military hospital ending his 40-year struggle for statehood for the Palestinian people. Arafat was one of the most recognizable figures on the world stage; a man who rose from a guerilla icon to a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Arafat named no successor and his death brings with it what many observers believe will be a fierce fight over who will take charge of the struggle Arafat led for 4 decades. When word of Arafat’s death was announced shortly after 4:30 am, thousands of Palestinians poured into the streets of Gaza and other cities to mourn.

Nigel Parry of the Electronic Intifada said it was encouraging to see young Palestinians like Dean Obeidallah, Maysoon Zayid, and Suheir Hammad, (p)reaching outside the choir through their art. Like Lechner, Parry related his story of “seeing the light.” He went to Palestine with no previous knowledge and wound up in a U.N. bus in a refugee camp, just in time to see a small child throw a rock—very ineffectually—at an Israeli soldier, who then knelt, cocked his gun, and aimed at the child. The soldier was about to kill the child, Parry said, when he spotted the U.N. bus, and guiltily stood up. “There is no context in the media,” Parry stated. That is why the Electronic Intifada and other information outlets are crucial, he said, because “information is what will end the conflict. If we could transport Americans to Rafah for five minutes, they would never support Israel.”

Electronic Intifada co-founder Laurie King-Irani is one of nearly forty authors featured in a new book, Patriotism, Democracy and Common Sense: Restoring America’s Promise at Home and Abroad, published by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation of Washington, DC. The book aims to educate Americans about alternatives to current US foreign, economic, Middle East, domestic, media, campaign finance, and voting rights policies. King-Irani’s chapter, “Awakening the American Political Debate on Palestine and Israel,” examines the role of the internet in building networks of citizen-activists to confront one of the most pressing issues of US foreign policy: the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.